On a warm spring day, with flowers blooming, the tide of the seasons changing, sweaters and jackets retiring, and semesters growing shorter, I feel angry. I am hanging out in the student lounge where we fill ourselves with Coca-Cola and microwave pizzas. Dennis, a fellow freshman, white and accruing more upperclassmen abuse than myself, is getting pushed around by another group of kids. At age 15 his whole style is tall, goofy, and uncomfortable. He gets knocked down to the ground by a bigger kid—punk—and the older students laugh. He just curls up and hides his face. I’ve been there and felt it before and I’m embarrassed to be capable of empathizing with such a pathetic existence. There’s a lull in the beating so I stand up and kick him in the back while he’s lying on the ground. I kick him to get a few laughs. I kick him to feel better. And I get those laughs, but at the cost that he will never forget. At the cost that I can never take it back. I only feel better for a few fleeting seconds.
All grown up, Dennis is an upstanding citizen engineering political campaigns—believing the American republic can work. We periodically cross paths at reunions and gatherings of the old D.C. scene. He’s not goofy anymore, but rather he’s endearing and cheerful. We share beers and laughs but I can see him looking behind my eyes. He knows that I know that he has not forgotten: You kicked me in the back, motherfucker.
* * *
Cutting down Interstate 5. The drive is long and the air conditioning’s been broken for years. We sweat it out in the car as we head farther south on our six-hour trek from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I am post-St. Albans, post-college, post-everything that the East Coast offered me. I have moved to California because its enduring promise of finding a new life resonated with me as I rolled up my diploma and packed my boxes. San Francisco is my new home but the allure of the road, of traveling to other California towns for music, art, and the unknown has become a core practice.
We cruise through the depths of the Central Valley, a gloomy stretch between the Bay Area and So Cal where a dense fog sometimes fills the air and the vast fields of agriculture surround us. The cassette player is permanently jammed and the radio just spits out static, so mostly we talk to each other the whole way down. I am laughing at something one of my friends said, but I am also slightly discomforted when he drops the f-bomb. He is one of the most progressive people I know and a deeply intelligent individual, so it contradicts everything I have ever heard him say in defense of equity for all people. “Hey man, do you have a problem with gay people?” I ask. “You’re always calling out people as ‘fags.’”
He turns to me and in earnest says, “No, not at all. Not at all. I am totally fine with gay people. I just hate faggots.”
I’m not quite laughing. I’m not quite angry. I am entirely unsettled. I am reminded at how many times I have also participated in the muddled, callous vortex of humor and disrespect.
A double-edged vocabulary list—nigger and faggot—sowing unity or drawing blood depending which side of the blade is used and, of course, who happens to be using it. Gay people call each other fags and we call each other niggers when none of us is required to do so. A gay person might say to another with a smile, oh don’t be such a fag, and a black friend will call out to me, what’s up, my nigga, and it will feel warm. Alternately, a gay person might look at another with a scowl and scream, get out of the room, you dirty faggot, just as a black person might grimace at me from the window of a car, their hand in the shape of a gun, and yell, step off my block, nigger. Human language bends so flexibly; such subtle shifts in situation and intonation turn salutations into weapons. And to cross the line, to take our malleable words outside of our own circles: for any non-black person to call me a nigger or for me to call anyone a faggot twists those volatile weapons into sharp tools of torture. There was a time when I would have called a friend of mine a fag for being too picky, too annoying or soft. I was stabbing wildly into the air, my blade ripping spiritual flesh—I was too foolish, too uncaring to see the damage.
In his 2008 HBO comedy special, Kill the Messenger, Chris Rock opines at considerable length about appropriate uses of the word faggot, although one must wonder who granted him— straight black man—license to stand as authority on the topic. “If you’re having a fight with somebody,” he says, “you should be able to say whatever you think is going to hurt this person the most… you one-legged bastard.”
He discusses actor Isaiah Washington’s dismissal from the television show Grey’s Anatomy. Washington had allegedly called fellow cast-member T.R. Knight a faggot during an argument. Rock questions, “What if the person [Washington] called a faggot was acting like a faggot?” Washington is black and Knight would later come out as gay. While there is no end to the amount of white people who need to be corrected on their use of homophobic language, there is also a sickness within black culture—American and elsewhere—that rallies against the rights and emotions of gay people. I have observed it my entire life— through friends, family, the music I listen to, and the popular figures I follow. At my worst moments I have been a participant in it. Our culture vigorously reminds us that no one really wants to be on the bottom alone; that when given the opportunity to strike out with language, legislation, or other forms of violence against others—despite our own battles for fairness—we might indulge ourselves more than we like to admit. It is not unlike kicking someone in the back when both of you are down.
In his discussion of hate language, Chris Rock clarifies for his audience: “You don’t have to be gay to act like a faggot.” He explains that if he were sitting at an intersection, singing along to Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” with such enthusiasm that it caused him to miss the green light, then the driver behind him would have license to call him a faggot. At the punchline, the video cuts to a black man in the audience standing up and clapping. I want to understand why they picked that hard cut at that moment to the black man standing up and clapping; when someone stands up and claps at a comedian’s joke, it’s not just an affirmation of humor but a vote of confidence in the ideology that has just been publicly offered. Rock concludes, “Shit, even Elton John would call me a faggot.”
Get on wid it. An’ make it good.
Castro Street is alive and this is my home. Rainbow flags hang from telephone poles, replacing the day-glo colorama of ’60s San Francisco. There are gay men, so many different kinds: the burly leather-adorned bears, the club-kid fashionistas, the Brooks Brothers-clad professionals, the extravagant losers with opiate-streaked eyes, and the elder statesmen wearing their blue denim shirts tucked into blue denim jeans—each strand of their white hair is a stripe of survival from the late 20th century AIDS detonation. Standing here on the streets of gay pride, the Castro is some kind of paradise.
Halloween feels like a gay Christmas in San Francisco: The streets of the Castro fill with thousands of costumed enthusiasts. And how fitting that the city gives this holiday to gay culture. It’s the one day when everyone can pretend to be someone else: Oh darling, you’d make such a good little queenie; it’s too bad you’re only playing. Put the costume back in the closet by tomorrow morning.
Is the Castro akin to a gay man’s version of early 20th century black Harlem, a safe-haven nestled in a city with more conservative values than its façade would like to admit? This radical openness wouldn’t fly elsewhere. So if you’re a gay man, you have to make a choice that no one should have to make: Stay here, locked up in the Castro, with all of your people, or venture outside where you’ll be subjected to hatred. Maybe on a warm white night they’ll come down here to knock a riot upside your head just to remind you that you’re a fag in their eyes.
Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance-era novel, Quicksand, follows a feminine protagonist, a tragic mulatto, who finds herself torn between living within the elitist confines of black Harlem, or living in a white European society that embraces her but still sees her as “the other.” Is the Castro so different for young gay kids showing up, green from college on the East Coast, filled with hopes of freedom of expression? They can choose to navigate the “free” but class-structured world of the Castro or swim through the “liberal” seas of San Francisco’s other scenes where they are met by smiles, handshakes, and pats on the back, but left to wonder who murmurs